Sunday, January 27, 2008

Porn Is Not For Kids

OK, I know it's been a while for The Webbed Toe, but I'm back and I have a list of ten topics or so to write about, so I'm planning to get your synapses firing again. Well, I'll try at least. Here it goes:

Making kids' movies these days must be hell. When I was a kid, Disney put out a new animated movie every few years, they dragged Bambi and the other classics out every once in a while and, in between, they made Witch Mountain movies. We were happy to have this stuff because there wasn't anything else. Now, it's a whole new world. Pixar makes brilliant movies. Enthusio asked me to make a list of my ten favorite movies and, in doing so, I realized that The Incredibles is probably in my top 25 -- not kids' movies, any movies. Even some lesser kids movies are pretty good. The first Shrek hit just the right balance between kid humor and grown-up humor. When it made a gadzillon dollars, everyone started trying to make kids' movies that arched their eyebrows at the culture for grown-ups' amusement. It's shrewd marketing, of course -- grown-ups buy the tickets after all.

The whole "kids movies with grown-up humor" thing, however, has gone way too far.

There are always going to be bad kids movies, just like there are bad grown-up movies. For example, the kids and I saw a kids movie named Doogal a few years ago. It made so little sense -- it climaxed with a showdown between two magical springs who cast their spells by twisting the ends of their handlebar mustaches, no lie -- that I began to wonder if it had been dubbed from another language. With a little research, I discovered that it more or less had, with the source material being French. Those crazy French. A mime show starring Carrot Top would have made more sense than Doogal.

Still, plain bad kids movies are not what this post concerns. This post concerns thoroughly inappropriate things being inserted in kids' movies for the purported amusement of grown-ups. The straw that broke the camel's back by reaching a tipping point over the line in the sand on this issue for me was the recent Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. I didn't see it, but I saw the ads and they were enough.

One of those ads featured during its 30-second duration the following "jokes:" (1) after the long-suffering Dave, the Chipmunks' pal/manager/plantation owner, talks to an attractive woman, one of the Chipmunks busts out the music line "bow-m, chick-a, bow-m, bow-m;" (2) after another woman leaves the room in a French maid outfit, one of the other Chipmunks lets loose a "oooh la la;" and (3) when some other Chipmunk leaps off of something heroically, he yells, "Yippee k-eye yeah mama-cita." Item (2) would be halfway tolerable. It's not a whole lot worse than that stinking Pepe LePue -- the second-worst Looney Tune after Speedy Gonzales -- used to do, although, in the Chipmunks' case, having the chipmunk say it suggests some weird inter-species stuff.

Items (1) and (3), however, depict the decline and fall of American culture.

Of the two, item (3) is slightly more tolerable. It derives from a famous Bruce Willis line from the Die Hard movies, specifically "Yippee K-eye yeah motherf----r." Really, do we really have to reference the mother of all obscenities in an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie?!? Oh, those Chipmunks, they're so f----n' funny, ha ha ha. Maybe Samuel L. Jackson -- the F-Word King -- can voice one of the Chipmunks in the next movie to really hammer home how hip the Chipmunks are.

So item (3) was appalling, but it really was nothing compared to item (1) -- in which one of the Chipmunks suggested the attractiveness of Dave's date by spouting the universally-known porn-movie music. As John McEnroe would say, "Are you kidding me?!?" Adults are supposed to want to think the Chipmunks are funny and thus want to see the movie because the Chipmunks know about porn?!? That had to be the logic behind putting that part of the movie in the ad. My head almost exploded when I saw that commercial.

I am a pretty liberal guy, but I think that we need an exception to the First Amendment for porn references in kids' movies. Maybe we can sick Dick Cheney on such things once he stops running the country.

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